Petition: Don’t send Olympic athletes to Fukushima (or Japan)

Add the message to relocate the 2020 Olympics and Paralympics entirely and stop them from going forward in Japan. This is an international disgrace that further compounds this tragedy. International officials are cowards.

Children are our most beloved and cherished gift and they are also the most vulnerable to the generational damage of man-made radiation in air, food, soil and water. Around the world children who are currently adolescent and possibly younger are in training to compete at the 2020 Summer Olympics and Paralympics in Japan. Their parents most likely have no idea that some of the venues are near the most devastating and ongoing nuclear and industrial disaster in world history, Fukushima Daiichi.

On March 11, 2016, the fifth anniversary of the Fukushima triple nuclear meltdowns, the Japanese Olympic minister Toshiaki Endo stated to the Associated Press that preliminary softball and baseball could be moved from the host city of Tokyo to Fukushima Prefecture. But it gets worse, now soccer has been added too. This isn’t mere speculation, in fact organizers are developing J Village, only a few miles from Fukushima Daiichi, into a training facility for Japan’s soccer team and possibly more. J Village was used as a disaster staging and support facility during the early days of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.

SO HOW DID WE GO FROM THE WORLD’S WORST NUCLEAR AND INDUSTRIAL DISASTER TO ONE OF THE VENUES FOR THE 2020 GAMES? In a stunning development in 2013, Japan’s Olympic bid was won by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe when he promised the International Olympic Committee (IOC) that “it (Fukushima Daiichi) has never done, and will never do, any damage in Tokyo”. Consequently, the IOC and International Paralympic Committee (IPC) are now left to engage in a dangerous game of bait and switch by using venues not only in Tokyo as originally agreed upon, but also in Fukushima Prefecture, not far from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster site.

Holding Olympic games in Fukushima Prefecture will endanger young athletes. To date there is no solution in sight to the ongoing radiation releases leaking into air, soil, food and water not only from Fukushima Daiichi but also from areas around the country that have been used for the open storage and incineration of toxic and radioactive tsunami rubble and garbage.